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Friday, February 29, 2008

Some in the antiwar movement are hoping for a '08 reprise to the summer of '68 protests at the Democratic National Convention, which was held in Chicago that year. The Politico's got the report:

A coalition of anti-war groups is vowing to protest this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Denver under the rubric “Re-create ’68,” prompting criticism from some on the left who are loath to revisit what they see as a disastrous time for both the anti-war movement and the Democratic Party.

Capping a year that saw the assassinations of both the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic National Convention erupted in violence as thousands of Chicago police officers, supported by U.S. Army troops and National Guardsmen, battled in the streets with activists protesting the Vietnam War. Inside the convention hall, the Democrats chose as their presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose the general election to Richard Nixon.

Re-create ’68?

“What’s the political calculation that speaks to them of the wisdom of civil disobedience — which means a massive media spectacle — on the brink of a Democratic campaign that could plausibly put a Democrat in the White House who’s committed to withdrawal from Iraq?” asked Todd Gitlin, an anti-Vietnam War activist who was at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. “If the objective is to put a belligerent Republican in the White House, they should keep up the good work.”

The “belligerent Republican” of whom Gitlin speaks will almost certainly be Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who spent the summer of 1968 as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Organizers acknowledge that their “Re-create ’68” moniker has been met with skepticism as they’ve toured the country to gin up support among fellow activists. “A lot of people of course associate it with the DNC of ’68 and react negatively,” said organizer Mark Cohen. But the point, Cohen said, isn’t to reproduce the violence associated with the 1968 convention, just the strong sense of countercultural protest that coalesced against the Vietnam War. “We don’t call ourselves ‘Re-create Chicago ’68,’” Cohen offered.

If antiwar radicals want to showcase their extremist views to a national television audience, by all means, let it rip.

The more examples of hard-left extremist antics that are distributed, the better it will be to paint the Democrats as in the tank with the most nihilist forces on the fringe of left-wing popular culture.